A press conference was held by Toei Company in Nerimaku Tokyo on Sunday for Kankuro Kudo’s upcoming rock ‘n’ roll comedy Shonen Merikensack. Kudo was in attendance along with stars Aoi Miyazaki, Yuichi Kimura, Tomorowo Taguchi, Hiroki Miyake, Yusuke Santamaria, and Koichi Sato. The press conference covered fairly typical promotional fluff. Kudo expressed his appreciation of Toei’s trust in him, Sato talked about the energy of the film and his love of rock music, and Miyazaki talked about how she was initially tentative because she doesn’t like loud music but when she finally saw the band together she though it was really cool. She also said if she was ever in a band she’d want to play the drums.

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The official website for Kuchisake Onna 2, the prequel to 2007’s Kuchisake Onna, aka “Carved” now has a trailer on the front page of its website. In the movie 16-year-old Rin Asuka plays a high school girl named Mayumi whose older sister’s ex-boyfriend disfigures her face with sulfuric acid, causing her to eventually become the murderous slit-mouthed woman. It was filmed on a lower budget than its predecessor but will get a legitimate theatrical release on March 22nd in Japan.

Official website

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The new poster art for the Stephen Chow-produced Shaolin Girl was released today, with more cast members featured along with the film’s star, Kou Shibasaki. Starting on March 8th these will start getting plastered all over Japanese theaters, leading up to its release on April 26th.

Source: Shaolin Girl production blog

Links:
Eigapedia

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The sequel to 2007’s Gegege no Kitaro, now officially titled Gegege no Kitaro: Sennen Noroi Uta (Kitaro and the Millennium Curse), will be released on July 12th, 2008. The official website now has a trailer up which you can view by clicking on the speech bubble next to Medama-oyaji (the little eyeball dude).

2008 marks the 40th anniversary of the original manga on which the films are based. The Gegege franchise has been experiencing a resurgence of late, with the anime series “Hakaba Kitaro” getting record ratings numbers for Fuji TV after Gegege no Kitaro (series 5) had similar success last year.

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The site for Chameleon: Long Goodbye, which we first wrote about here, just rolled out a new flash layout and added a new trailer. There are no new movie clips in the second trailer but there is some production footage, a short clip of Tatsuya Fujiwara talking about the project, and at the very end we get to see him doing a pretty cool stunt sliding down a metal staircase on his butt. I, for one, am officially sold. The menu is in English so check out the official website and click on “Trailer” for the video.

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